Elon Musk wants you to believe that Twitter put its thumb on the scale to benefit Democrats. Seems that there was a thumb on the scale: to tilt Twitter toward Donald Trump.
“Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump,” a former employee testified to the House Jan. 6 Committee, according to a report from The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of a 122-page memo on the role that social media companies played in the Jan. 6 insurrection that was not included, for some reason, in the final committee report.
Actually, the some reason appears to be that the Jan. 6 committee might have also been worried about political backlash in Silicon Valley if this section of the report were to see the light of day.
Don’t want to piss off the tech overlords, basically, is the theme here.
Because it surely wasn’t just Twitter that was used by Trump and the alt-right to organize the armed effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The report obtained by the Post details the roles that Facebook, YouTube and Twitch and smaller, fringe networks played in amplifying the effort to stoke interest in the ceremonial Jan. 6 electoral vote count as an opportunity to prevent the transfer of political power from Trump to Joe Biden.
The section focusing on Twitter is most interesting in light of what Musk is trying to do with his Twitter files, revealing that Trump “was a unique user who sat above and beyond the rules of Twitter,” according to the report.
“There was this underlying understanding we’re not reaching out to the President,” Anika Collier Navaroli, one of the longest-tenured members of Twitter’s safety policy team, told the committee. “We’re not reaching out to Donald Trump. There is no point in doing education here because this is how this individual is. So, the resolution was to do nothing.”
This is a different picture from the one that Musk has been trying to paint with his Twitter Files, through which the world’s once-wealthiest man is trying to get us to believe that former Twitter execs bent the rules of the platform to push a liberal agenda.
Can’t wait for that next installment of Musk’s Twitter Files that spells out in great detail the way Twitter bent over backwards to try to help Trump overthrow American democracy.
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Chris Graham
